Last week I started my Xmas giving-to-strangers early. I left my phone in a taxi, joining the masses who do the same thing every month. London residents leave an average 10,000 mobile phones in the back of taxis every month!

The phone was switched off by morning, and my impassioned plea of return (offering a reward) was swallowed whole. Impossible to know whether it was picked up by the driver or the next customer. They might think they’ve scored themselves a free iPhone but the hardware will soon be locked off from the network, a small comfort.

All the content was backed up so no major loss there but the post-loss scramble for recovery has been educational on other fronts. Apple’s MobileMe subscription service (I wasn’t subscribed) could have told me the location of the device. Imagine the hours of fun tracking down the new owner! MobileMe can also remotely add a passcode lock or even remotely wipe your data. Unfortunately all of this would be moot once someone swapped out the sim card or flashed the firmware. I’m pretty sure Apple could offer some more sophisticated services given their central control of hardware locking, but the cynic in me thinks they’re probably happier selling more units.

Luckily for geeky me I had 3 backup phones sitting on my desk at work. I’m finally giving my HTC Magic “Google Phone” a chance and I don’t think I’ll be looking back. As you’d expect the integration with Google services is outstanding: turn your phone on for the first time, sign into Gmail and watch your entire contacts list get populated! The Android Marketplace for native apps is burgeoning from an open system without the censorship of Apple’s App Store. You can even use the full power of Zenbu online with our mobile friendly site. (A mobile without Zenbu would just be cruel)

My favourite feature is the security offered by the (currently free) app WaveSecure. If you lose your phone you can view its current location online, remotely access call and sms logs, wipe sensitive data and lock the phone. And the coolest thing is that you get notified if the sim card gets swapped out. Combine all these features up with some simple sleuthing and imagine the scenario now after tracking the “new user” down and calling them on their own number.

“Oh hi, I’m calling because you’ve found my phone, can I have it back please? I’m standing right behind you.”

If every phone could do this, cellphone theft would be a thing of the past.

We’ve long enjoyed the ability to get “spatial context” by seeing what’s nearby on Zenbu.

You can see the nearest 5 entries on each Zenbu entry page.

You can search for the nearest “anything” in your Zenbu mobile application to see what’s around too. (If you didn’t know that, the secret is to search for a single space character)

It would be self-assuming to believe that the search giant Google was emulating Zenbu but it is a nice compliment to see them release a similar feature – what’s nearby. Well done Google!

There were 7,223 edits from 103 different users in October with 112,000 unique visitors and over 160,000 pageviews. The biggest editors were

Most of the Zenbu edits were from the upload of every Health Practitioner as mentioned previously but there were high numbers of edits from a diverse range of people which is really cool.

GaryMck added a bunch of accommodations in the Southland area.

Burgla used his extensive travelling to fine tune the location of many entries on the map, helping everyone else locate things exactly.

onco_p53 has only been a member for 5 days but already rocketed into the leader chart entering a variety of information on locations of government offices, facilities at Auckland University and cemeteries in Rotorua district. A very promising debut!

rodo hand placed on the map Fire Stations from all over the country, another valuable contribution.

Thanks to everyone who edited, searched or used Zenbu in November. It’s a thrill watching the site content and usage grow.

One in ten local searches are for physicians or surgeons according to the Yellow Pages Association.

Zenbu now has the medical industry well covered with the addition of over 5000 medical facility entries which means you can find your nearest hospital, pharmacy, podiatrist, dentist, osteopath, chiropractor or optometrist. This data came from the Ministry of Health public register of facilities in the Health Practitioner Index. Like most government obtained data it is a little thin on details providing only a name and address but this is powerful, basic information and gives the Zenbu community an excellent base on which to add further details such as phone numbers and websites.

Big thanks to Alicia Webb, Team Leader Identity Data Management, Information Directorate at the Ministry of Health for her exceptional help in making this information even more readily accessible to the public through Zenbu.

There were 5,425 edits from 118 different users in October with 110,000 unique visitors and over 160,000 pageviews. The biggest editors were

Nice one team! The bulk of the Zenbu numbers was made up of the entry of every Early Childhood Centre (kindergartens and childcare centres) nationwide from a Ministry of Education list. I’m not actively looking for any of these myself but I know that a lot my friends soon will be so it’s great to have this available.

The number of edits on Zenbu will always be several orders of magnitude smaller than the number of views, but as the visibility of Zenbu data scales up, up and away (with increased exposure on search engines and third party sites) we will pull in more and more editors. Reducing the “barriers to entry” is important which is why we try to make the process of editing so simple that anyone can do it with zero training. We do appreciate the ideas we get from the community about how to improve this so please keep that coming.

Zenbu NZ now has well over 82,000 listings, 6 figures isn’t far away and that is exciting!

Did you know that you can find every single payphone in New Zealand on Zenbu? Earlier this year Kiwitonita got Telecom to release this data and we loaded almost 3000 payphone locations onto Zenbu. (There are actually over 4000 payphones in NZ but lots of them are paired up at the same spot.)

I can’t say I’ve had a real life use case for this data yet, being able to find the nearest payphone from your mobile phone has been of questionable use, so it was very nice to receive this email today.

For a reason I won’t bother you with ( if I say legal stuff that should cover all bases! ) I needed to know if I recalled correctly that there was a payphone in Mt. Eden Road Auckland that I’d used when I last visited from Australia – your telecom site was about as helpful as – well, our Telstra – need I say more – maybe you got the info from there but I got everything else but. But I typed in the location on Zenbu & that showed me the nearest payphone! Appreciated. B.

Nifty! I knew it would be useful for something.

Data costs on NZ cellular networks have been somewhat prohibitive for the average user for a long time but have finally become affordable. For $10 a month I get a 100MB package of data as an addon to my Vodafone account. It won’t have you cancelling your broadband connection but it does give you the freedom to do simple online lookups at will.

In order to provide mobile users with a more tailored experience, www.zenbu.co.nz now comes in a mobile-optimised format. This means pages stripped of graphics with static maps that will be fast to load on your 3G or Edge connection. Just go to the same URL as always, the server will auto-detect mobile browsers and show appropriate content.

For the Zenbu junky like myself it means it’s dead simple to lookup and edit business details while I’m there staring in their window. I dream of an army of Zenbu editors correcting details on the things they visit every day so that everybody can have online, real time access to the very same information we could see walking down the street. (Not quite as catchy as Martin Luther King’s dreams but each to their own!)

Another nifty development on Mobile is the GeoVector World Surfer application available on iPhone and Android. It’s an American company with development based here in NZ that uses appropriate local channels to serve relevant local search results. I found out last week that Zenbu is one of the feature channels for New Zealand users which is very cool! (So pretty to see the Zenbu logo alongside internet giants Google & Yahoo on the GeoVector Channels page!!) They are using the Zenbu XML api to get live search results. More about GeoVector on Stuff.

World Surfer is the closest thing I’ve seen to Augmented Reality (AR) using Zenbu data, or any NZ data at all.

Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with (or augmentedby) virtual computer-generated imagery – creating a mixed reality.

AR is something I think we’ll see a lot more of in coming years. Today’s leading mobile phones, and tomorrow’s everyday phones, can use their full array of sensors (GPS, digital compass & live video) with data sources like Zenbu to present us with depths of information about the world around us. Part of me sees it as gimicky, part of me thinks it’s very cool indeed. The applications using it and real world use cases are still coming. What do you think of  (the possibilities of) AR?

There were 3301 edits from 147 users in September with over 100,000 unique visitors to the website for the fourth month in a row.  It’s so encouraging to know that Zenbu is helping thousands of New Zealander’s every month find the basic information they need. Thanks to everyone using Zenbu, searchers and editors.

Top 10 editors in September were

Vianet provided basic information on over 1500 accommodations nationwide and Booking.com added another 100; this is an excellent boost to one of the most searched categories.

RC8 provided a bunch of spreadsheets of chain stores: Bed Bath and Beyond, Frank Casey Suit Hire, Heathcote Appliances, Les Mills, Pascoes, SBS Bank, Shanton, Pumpkin Patch, Urban Angel and Dog’s Breakfast. Some of the Store Locators for such chains can leave a lot to be desired so it’s great to know this info is readily available in Zenbu.

Hoogy is working on a project to share the locations of Free WiFi spots around NZ and is kindly updating Zenbu as well. Great stuff Hoogy.

GaryMck is making edits all over the country – either he travels a lot or he is letting his fingers do the walking from his desktop! It’s amazing how much Zenbu-ing can be done from the comfort of your home combining internet research, StreetView, Satellite imagery and local knowledge. The Add Neighbour link on each entry page was added this month as an assist for you desktop Zenbu’ers as a way to help people make sure every shop on a street is in Zenbu.

pb12 is another cool story. He is a user of the NZOGPS Garmin GPS maps, which uses Zenbu data freely under our CC license, and noted that he couldn’t find his local Hamilton sports park, because they weren’t entered. Working from a list on the Hamilton City Council website he added every park in the city with details about the facilities available. Very cool. Go Hamilton! Go Zenbu!

Version 2.27 of the Zenbu iPhone app is out today, almost 1 year after it first went live. Thousands of New Zealanders have downloaded the app and use it as a mobile reference directroy on a regular basis. The app is entirely offline so we don’t have any statistics but anecdotal evidence suggests it is well used and appreciated.

Even a few foreigners have used the app; we got a glowing reference from a German tourist who raved about having Zenbu on his iPhone during his stay here (and the cheap Zenbu wifi available nationwide).

Back in February I was contacted by a student in the final semester of his degree course in Computer Engineering at Manukau Institute of Technology. He asked if he could use the Zenbu database for a “location awareness” software project, sketches below, a search app similar to the Zenbu iPhone app. Zenbu data is Creative Commons Attribution Licensed so of course I said yes. I was even able to help Jay along with some of my experiences learned in developing the original app.

In April Jay released Find!NZ on the Apple App Store. After 3 days it was top of the Free Navigation category. It is still top of the Navigation category over 4 months later! Jay has told me the app has had over 20,000 downloads in that time which is amazing. Between the Zenbu app and the Find!NZ app, Zenbu data must be on almost every iPhone in NZ. Wow.

Last week I finally got to meet Jay and I gratefully accepted his offer to buy me lunch. It turns out that Jay was contacted by an impressed user of Find!NZ and offered a full time job as an iPhone app developer which I think is really cool. Jay may not remember but in his original email to me he wrote

I actually have no intention to be a permanent iPhone App developer.

But Jay does have a family and bills to pay so he is now gainfully employed as an iPhone developer. Congratulations Jay.

Find!NZ is now up to its third or fourth version and it is pretty shit hot. Jay was a Graphic Designer in a past life and that shows through in the beautiful icons throughout the app, the fact that he is now an iPhone developer wizard certainly adds a lot of polish to the app too. Whether you have the Zenbu app or not, I highly recommend checking Find!NZ out.

Jay and I talked about a bunch of possible future developments (just imagine two iPhone nerds bubbling over the potential)  and I plan to work with him to fine tune Zenbu usage on the iPhone. One of Jay’s requests was for more Public Toilets on Zenbu! Councils often have lists of these so everybody do Jay a favour and look on your local council website for a list of toilet locations. If you send them through in a spreadsheet to admin@zenbu.co.nz we’ll get them loaded up on the site for Jay and all the iPhone users.

(I wonder if this story will encourage other developers to develop applications using Zenbu data. Mobile apps for Symbian and Blackberry would be prime candidates. It might not make you rich but the fame could take you places!)

2179 edits from 135 different users in August bringing us up to over 75,000 entries with over 100,000 unique users of the site in the month. That doesn’t even begin to factor in the people using Zenbu data on their mobiles, iPhones and GPS units (as all that usage is offline or offsite). It’s really cool to see the continued growth of the data and people who value it. Thank you to everyone using Zenbu!

Top 10 editors in August were

One nice big easy win was the addition of 500+ parks and reserves maintained by the Waitakere City Council; handy for finding that nearby park.

Manukau City Council finally coughed up (a mere 9 months after asking) their list of Environmental Health licensed premises which added 360 entries including a lot of hairdressers and some new bars and restaurants.

Councils are a great potential source of information in New Zealand. Take a look at your local council website and see if they publish information about their parks, toilets, libraries, cemeteries or any other public facilities. If we can pull that down into a spreadsheet we can upload it all into Zenbu for everybody to access. Bring it on!